Should miners collude to steal funds from wallet confiscated by US government?

[kik1977]

It will be interesting to see what happens to the seized BTC, not only from the SR wallets, but also from the 80 million dollar whopper that DPR had.  Would confiscated BTC be viewed as a forfeited property that could be resold, like a drug dealers car?  Or would BTC viewed as a contraband substance, like the drugs themselves?  If the former, then the Feds could dump a metric shit-ton of coins for sale, possibly crashing the market.  If the latter, then roughly 5% of all BTC in existence are permanently off-limits.  Good for us, this scenario, as BTC would get more rare. 

Another scenario - DPR goes to his grave never giving the password and the wallet.dat stays locked for eternity. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/04/fbi-silk-road-bitcoin-seizure/

The FBI initially seized over 26,000 Bitcoins. I asked the FBI spokesperson what the plan is for those cryptocoins. “We will download the Bitcoin and store them,” she said. “We will hold them until the judicial process is over.”

Then what?

“This is kind of new to us,” she said. “We will probably just liquidate them.”

[kik1977]

Please excuse me for posting again, but this is too funny:

“The FBI has not been able to get to Ulbricht’s personal Bitcoin yet,” wrote Hill. An FBI spokesperson said to Hill that the “$80m worth” that Ulbricht had “was held separately and is encrypted”. At current exchange rates, that represents slightly more than 5% of all bitcoins in circulation.

Even if the FBI is not able to transfer the money, merely having possession of the wallet file itself is enough to prevent the coins being spent. The Bureau is in a position equivalent to having seized a safe belonging to a suspect with no idea of the combination – and no hope of forcing it open any other way.

(http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/07/fbi-bitcoin-silk-road-ross-ulbricht)

Ok, that's right, if they have possession of the wallet, this will prevent anyone who has the private key to spend them... 

[Rassah]

I think the coins should be stolen, but that it should be done using the good'ol method of simply stealing the private keys for that wallet. That may involve some more difficult work of actually hacking FBI's computers to find out where their keys are stored at. Miners and futzing with the blockchain should definitely be left out of it.

You can be sure the key is stored offline.

I think you may be giving the FBI too much credit. They may just have downloaded Bitcoin-QT, didn't bother to password protect it, and stored the coins there. Or just opened a Blockchain.info wallet account. I somehow doubt they know or understand offline wallets and paper backups and such.
Then again, maybe I just have a very low opinion of the FBI.

[vpitcher07]

If you want to completely destroy the credibility of bitcoin and all the progress it has made to be widely accepted then go ahead and try the 51% attack. Just let me know when you're doing it so i can sell....

stupid idea is stupid

[bernard75]

I think you may be giving the FBI too much credit. They may just have downloaded Bitcoin-QT, didn't bother to password protect it, and stored the coins there. Or just opened a Blockchain.info wallet account. I somehow doubt they know or understand offline wallets and paper backups and such.
Then again, maybe I just have a very low opinion of the FBI.

I think you are still giving them too much credit. They took the encrypted harddrives and now they try to figure out what to hell is on them. Provided the NSA gave them some processing power to even open those.

[Oldgamer]

At first, who said that money is still there?

The block chain?

lol
money in a wallet, not chain
 lol
And also, good luck to get money back if it is already converted
lol

[Aseras]

I'd support making it impossible for the coins to ever be spent from that address.

[Rassah]

At first, who said that money is still there?

The block chain?

lol
money in a wallet, not chain
 lol
And also, good luck to get money back if it is already converted
lol

Uh... wait... are you saying that money is currently being stored in a bitcoin wallet, and not in a bitcoin blockchain? 

[Birdy]

@OP:
That would be funny, wouldn't it?
The answer is still no.

It would need most of the community (not only the miners) to pull that off.
If someone manages to steal 1/4 of all Bitcoins (cracked the encryption) it might be time to do stuff like this.

[600watt]

most likely scenario: some sneaky fed agents will get access to this wallet and later they will tell the public those coins were accidently "erased"/destroyed etc.   

[Buffer Overflow]

At first, who said that money is still there?

The block chain?

lol
money in a wallet, not chain
 lol
And also, good luck to get money back if it is already converted
lol

Bitcoins are technically just stored in the blockchain ledger. Your wallet holds the private key(s) giving you the power to amend the ledger.

[murraypaul]

    First they came for the communists,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

    Then they came for the socialists,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

    Then they came for me,
    and there was no one left to speak for me.

You really need to get a sense of perspective.

Police arrest drug dealer.
Film at 11.

[cr1776]

If they haven't been moved yet, just get DPR to divulge the key to someone he trusts for the non-personal wallets.  

For his coins, if they were a brain wallet, they could just hold him until he remembers.

I think the coins should be stolen, but that it should be done using the good'ol method of simply stealing the private keys for that wallet. That may involve some more difficult work of actually hacking FBI's computers to find out where their keys are stored at. Miners and futzing with the blockchain should definitely be left out of it.

[Elwar]

of course but we should use big magnets like in breaking bad

I support the big magnet approach.

[gollum]

I vote NO!

I assume the feds wont be able to access most wallets and those coins will no longer be in circulation.
That means all other bitcoins becomes worth more since we will have 2,8% less coins in circulation, making each coin worth 2,8% more. (21M - 0.6M coins)

The scenario of miners stealing those 600K coins results in:
a) the seized coins will be transfered to a few miners, not to everyone - not fair.
b) it will hurt the goodwill of the bitcoin community if the action of 51% succeeds, what prevents the miners from doing it again?

[BTCLuke]

I believe in the NAP, & that means I will never initiate aggression against any of you nitwits...

But if I hear of some miners out there trying to start up a movement to conspire to steal coins, mark my words I will HUNT YOU DOWN AND KILL YOU ALL.

...Totally in defense.

You will have aggressed not only against my personal savings by trying to destroy the bitcoin network, but also the savings of every other bitcoiner alive, and ultimately humanity itself since bitcoin is what is going to help mankind survive the coming global turmoil.

So in my mind, conspiracy against the blockchain is literally WORSE than conspiracy to detonate a nuclear weapon.

Comprende? Don't even joke about this stuff.

[Oldgamer]

At first, who said that money is still there?

The block chain?

lol
money in a wallet, not chain
 lol
And also, good luck to get money back if it is already converted
lol

Uh... wait... are you saying that money is currently being stored in a bitcoin wallet, and not in a bitcoin blockchain? 

What I meant is control of the money.

 

[BitChick]

Let's see.  Stealing fund from the wallet owned by the US government. That would help boost the legitimacy and credibility of Bitcoin how? 

[Qu1ck$1Lv3r]

No, not steal it.

It would be funny to see all the major pools refuse to include any transactions to/from that address though... make them wait days/weeks for a confirmation

I think it would be hilarious if everyone banned those coins. Force the feds to launder the bitcoins in order to cash them out, that would be soooo frickin ironic.

[numismatist]

51% or hard fork maybe.  I'm sure it could be  done with the top three pools pretty easily.

Oh... good explanation. I nominate you for president of the team which oversees this operation. I call it Steal Team 6.

Once the possibility of this is out I declare Bitcoins to be broken.